


Here

by sencha



Category: Big Hero 6 (2014)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-11
Updated: 2015-01-11
Packaged: 2018-03-07 03:14:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3159158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sencha/pseuds/sencha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hiro's a genius; Tadashi's adaptable.</p>
<p>(literally just Tadashi loving how smart Hiro is and building Baymax for him)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here

Where Hiro Hamada is a genuine natural-born genius, Tadashi is acceptably above average. Hiro can memorise textbooks as he reads, not in huge slabs of frame-by-frame video but in patterns and ideas, formulas that build upon binary, upon the fundamental truth of 1 + 1 = 2 (given standardised units in three dimensions). He grasps, as instinctively as a mother to her children, the relationship between art and science and mathematics. When they sent Hiro to the scanners, the live map of neuronal connections would put the nightlights of San Fransokyo to shame.

Tadashi watches those infinite sparks burst and fade, almost faster than the eye can see, and this painful tightness in his heart cannot be anything but love. It would be stupid to feel jealous of a baby, after all, and Tadashi is no Hiro Hamada level of genius but he is still a Hamada.

So Hiro becomes _the child prodigy_ and Tadashi is _the older brother_. Their mother tells Tadashi to look after Hiro, and their father tells him older siblings have to step up and protect the other kids.

“Think of it like a maths problem,” says their father. “You’ve had 100% of our attention for all these years. Now we have to split it between the two of you.”

“50% each?” asks Tadashi, because he’s not quite sure how to calculate the intensity of parental affection. They love you with all their heart, but they love your little brother with the same, and you don’t quite understand how hearts can divide in two and not get smaller. They tell you that’s what living things are like; they show you how to make bread and you watch the yeast swell inside the dough until it’s rising above the bowl and you have to punch it back down.

Their father nods. “You want to show Hiro what it’s like to be loved 100%, right?”

“I’ll show him what it’s like to be loved 150%,” Tadashi says, because he’s always believed in the sort of education that has you learn from past experiences. If Tadashi can be loved at 100%, Hiro should have better.

 

Their parents die when Hiro is three and all Tadashi can think is _now Hiro will only have two-thirds the love he deserves_. He calculates how long it will take for their parents’ inheritance to run out at a steady rate of thirty-thousand dollars per year, then shakes his head and recalculates because he can get a job, and they still have a house, and Hiro, as expected, has landed himself a full scholarship for school. Pride folds over sorrow as he remembers how Hiro had latched onto his leg and recited back the contents of the letter in English, then Japanese, then the equivalent Morse code.

Now, Hiro kicks at Aunt Cass and stubs his toes. While Tadashi learns to enclose his sorrow in angle brackets and closed circuits, Hiro cries until his lips are dry and cracked. Hiro cries until his eyes swell up and he can’t see the roads that betrayed their parents, or the sun that shone so bright the day their funeral was held.

When Tadashi hands his report to Aunt Cass, she scans through budgets and investment plans, rental agreements and résumés. The sky grows ashen; the shadows lengthen and dance in flickering leaps across her curtains.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

The other driver hadn’t asked Tadashi whether he was okay with losing his parents to fractured spinal cords and punctured lungs. Nobody at the funeral had asked Tadashi whether he was okay with never seeing his parents again. They said things like _I’m so sorry_ and _it gets better_.

“I’m fine,” he says now to Aunt Cass, looking away so she knows he’s not, and whatever was on the tip of her tongue gets mixed up with all the other words she throws at him now as if they’ll somehow heal this burning ache in his chest.

“Leave adult things to the adults, you precocious child,” she tells him, wiping at her own eyes.

Tadashi thinks of Hiro, who can assemble electronics faster than the parts are made, tucked into bed upstairs with his thumb in his mouth like a baby, thoughts filled with nothing but _mom_ and _dad_ and _why_. He thinks of support networks and financial security; he looks at his report scattered on the floor at Aunt Cass’ feet. He doesn’t feel very much like a child.

 

“Tadashi,” says Hiro, holding out his hand for money. Tadashi loves how Hiro says his name all the time. He gives Hiro the money Aunt Cass had earned and laughs, selfishly, when Hiro repeats his name with the love of a satisfied child.

Tadashi hates the way Hiro screams his name when the ambulance comes to take Tadashi to hospital. It’s scared and betrayed and sharp. Tadashi worries it will tear Hiro’s throat to shreds. Scars he can handle, especially if they’re his own fault, but he never wants to be the one who hurts Hiro. He has to take care of himself too because Hiro loves him.

 

It is under these conditions that Baymax is conceived: Hiro needs a friend, and Tadashi will do anything for Hiro; Hiro has gotten spoilt with the love of three, and Tadashi is just one person; Hiro needs someone who will be by his side forever, and Tadashi is human and fragile.

Baymax is a _personal companion_. He is affectionate and huggable, but also durable. Tadashi hugs the shower, the fridge and the dining table for research and decides that neither metal, glass nor wood are ‘huggable’ materials. He stabs a hole through his pillow and tears apart cotton wool and decides that soft things are not very durable at all.

After that, he tries rubber, but it cracks in the dry summer and flakes off when he snuggles against it. Plastics are economic and environmentally friendly; there are seven types of plastic and one of them includes polyvinylchloride resin. It doesn’t feel like human skin when Tadashi presses his cheek against it, but it is good enough for a prototype, at least.

There’s no replacing metal when it comes to the skeleton, but there is room for replacement when it comes to the programming. Tadashi remembers the time he thought he’d never use up a thousand terabytes. Things change. Tadashi takes the biggest data card he has and labels it with his name.

 

Hiro gets bullied. He skips a grade. He gets bullied. He skips two grades. Tadashi is there to pull the brats off his brother’s back, but he is powerless to stop them clambering back on. Hiro begins to take correspondence classes. The teachers don’t care because he still passes all his exams, motivated by an approaching future where there are no more exams to pass. Hiro Hamada still wins prestigious awards that spawn newspaper articles, all prefaced with _Hiro Hamada, student of_...It makes Tadashi furious, but at least it gives Hiro something to do. That final time Tadashi had stood between Hiro and his bullies, he had turned around with a reassuring smile and seen, below the terror and the relief, something burning in his brother’s eyes that scared him.

It occurs to Tadashi that Hiro, too, is human and fragile. He tips his cap up and swipes absently at his laptop screen. Baymax, he decides, needs to be a healer as well as a companion.

 

Every day Tadashi goes down to their lab and there is something new there. It is Hiro’s final year of school and Tadashi worries that after he graduates, Hiro will have no reason to stretch out his potential. He’s co-opted Hiro into helping him invent things, and he learns things about his brother that make him fall in love all over again.

For instance, Hiro loves to fly. He’s a fan of Jack Lee’s kung fu movies, which Tadashi knew, but he loves mecha anime more. Tadashi loves mecha anime – in secret. It turns out that Hiro has known that for a long time. It turns out that Hiro knows Tadashi’s password _and_ where he keeps all his top secret files. Tadashi’s heart stops for a whole five seconds while Hiro smirks proudly at him.

Then it turns out that Hiro only knows where the files are, not how to access them. Tadashi has never been so grateful for voice-recognition and fingerprint encryption. He’s going to show Hiro someday, but right now Baymax can’t even inflate properly and if Hiro ever sees all the videos of his failures Tadashi will die of embarrassment. He wants to be an older brother Hiro can be proud of.

“You know, I sort of like peanut butter ice-cream,” says Hiro suddenly, his voice turning wistful. Tadashi spends the next week manually formulating the chemical essence of peanut butter and figuring out exactly what gives Hiro a rash when he tries to eat it. At the end of the week, Tadashi has a recipe for the perfect peanut butter ice cream. Hiro churns out a commercial level ice-cream maker in half an hour and they spend the weekend helping Aunt Cass coax a small fortune from the pockets of reluctant parents.

“That was awesome!” shouts Hiro afterwards, not even caring that he’s effectually been doing unpaid work for the whole weekend. “Rule #456, right?”

“Crazy awesome,” Tadashi corrects, ruffling his hair. “Hamada brother projects are _always_ crazy awesome.”

“Except that time you tried to build an artistic sushi maker,” says Hiro. Tadashi yelps and bops him on the head, but they’re both smiling.

 

One day Hiro makes himself a toy that doesn’t win any prizes that Tadashi knows about, because Hiro doesn’t enter it in any competitions Tadashi would know about. Shortly after, three burly men are heaped up in an alleyway and Tadashi is swearing that there are no competitions he will be ignorant of ever again, even illegal bot fighting competitions that make Hiro smile as if this is something that will wash away years of Tadashi not being enough to compensate for the loss of their parents, as if Tadashi and Aunt Cass and every other teacher on earth has been so busy teaching Hiro engineering they have utterly failed to teach him about people.

And maybe they have. Hiro evidently doesn’t understand the danger that he was in; he doesn’t understand that Tadashi is a fallible human being who takes _time_ to get to the other side of town, even speeding on his motorcycle. Hiro doesn’t understand that some bullies won’t be satisfied with a couple of punches and a wad of bills. Hiro is an unbelievable, ridiculous, naïve _child_ and when they get home Tadashi is going to sew a GPS into every inch of Hiro’s jacket because if Tadashi hadn’t been watching for this exact sort of thing, Aunt Cass could have had to go to another funeral.

Tadashi is done with letting people get hurt.

“Someone has to help,” he mutters. “I’m not losing you too.”

 

_I am Baymax_ , he types, _your personal healthcare companion_. He pulls up the patient form and begins to fill it in. _Surname: HAMADA_. _Given Name(s): TADASHI_.

He pauses.

_Given Name(s): HIRO_. Baymax is a personal healthcare companion. He was made for Hiro. Tadashi has been working on a voice recognition chip, modified from Krei Tech’s VOX3000 to convert speech to code. He’s also been constructing Baymax’s voice chip from recordings like this one now. There’s a lot of programming involved, more than he’d thought there would be at first. Aside from the healthcare card, he has also made a more basic card. He’s going to put that near Baymax’s head, in a different reader. This card will have all the basic programming: obstruction evasion; movement; speech; activation and deactivation protocol. This way, whoever uses Baymax can concentrate on specialised updates and customisation. Perhaps when he refines the way Baymax moves people can create chips for surgery and investigation. He stares at the half-inflated vinyl in wonder, letting himself dream, for a moment, that someday a fractured spinal cord and punctured lung wouldn’t mean your children would become orphans and your youngest child wouldn’t have to go out and risk his life bot fighting to find some sort of satisfaction in life.

That brings Tadashi back to reality.

At its core, Baymax will be able to accompany Hiro to places, treat minor injuries and inflate to protect him. Tadashi wants Baymax to be able to do more than that at a basic level. Therefore, he copies Hiro’s file over and attaches several conditions to it.

_if _patient name_ (s/n: HAMADA, g/n: HIRO) = ACTIVE,_

“Following treatment, give him a lollipop,” Tadashi whispers. “He likes those gross medicine-flavoured red ones. Pay particular attention to his dental hygiene. Keep reminding him he still has a family. Remind him that he had parents who loved him. When he’s upset, his eyes will...how do you describe that in words? Skip that; I’ll fill it in later. When he’s upset, give him a hug. I’ll motion capture some for reference. Don’t let him eat too much ice cream. If someone has bad intentions towards him – I’ll list some signs of that later – put yourself in front.”

Tadashi swallows suddenly. Things like special conditions – he doesn’t know whether they will work. He hopes Hiro will never trigger this one.

“If – if he tries to compromise your healthcare system, like use you in a bot fight or something, shut that down. Full lockdown, right there. Don’t let him touch your healthcare chip anymore. Find me. If I can’t be there right then, you’re my stand-in. Make sure Hiro knows that. Tell him what I’d tell him in that situation. You know, like _I’m here_. Things like that. _Are you alright? Hang on, don’t worry. Hiro. I will always be with you_.”

Startled, Tadashi jerks away from the recorder. He had almost forgotten he was talking to Baymax. He checks his laptop and curses when he sees that Hiro has snuck out of the house again. Bot fighting again. If he had the power, Tadashi would crush every fighter bot made to dust.

He doesn’t think he is a violent person, not the way Hiro is. He doesn’t enjoy seeing other people’s hard work fall apart in a shower of sparks, even if Hiro makes destruction look beautiful. Those tiny light displays are formed by wires breaking and connections lost. They may be fireworks, but Tadashi has seen Hiro’s brain, and it is like the entirety of the night sky, lit up by infinite showers of shooting stars.

Just to be sure, when he has finished all Hiro’s special instructions, he copies everything to the healthcare chip as well. It’s always good to have a backup.

 

What Tadashi realises, eventually, is that Hiro knows a lot. This is obvious, but less obvious is the realisation that because Hiro knows so much, he is used to being in control. To Hiro, everything makes sense; 1 + 1 = 2 will eventually lead to e = mc2. What Hiro hasn’t learned yet is that you can piss people off just by existing, and pissed-off people are going to try and hurt you. Because of this, Hiro gets cornered nine times out of ten when he goes bot fighting, and he never expects it. Put Hiro on the spot and he gets flustered. Get him flustered and all his common sense goes right out the window. He doesn’t remember any of the karate moves Tadashi made him learn for self-defence, nor does he have the capacity to at least call for help.

For all his IQ points, Hiro is surprisingly simple; Tadashi knows this because Hiro lies with complete honesty. _That calculation is wrong_ , he says, when everything else about him shouts _I want to test you, and I want you to pass_. Hiro says _it wasn’t me_ with wide eyes and a red face, and he fidgets, too, as if the squeak in his voice wasn’t enough to give him away.

Tadashi makes the most of this by ambushing Hiro from behind their bedroom door, taking advantage of Hiro’s frozen state to tickle him mercilessly. With Hiro giggling helplessly under him, Tadashi can almost pretend that Hiro isn’t two minutes from death every couple of nights. Close enough to feel each other’s heartbeats, it is as if nothing on earth could keep them apart.

 

In the end, it’s the bot fighting that saves them and Tadashi’s societally acceptable way that dooms him. By the time that happens, though, Hiro doesn’t really mind. Despite the empty bed he knows is behind the curtains in his room, he’s not that lonely anymore.

“Tadashi Hamada was our best friend,” GoGo asserts. She shows him shaky videos she took with Tadashi as they raced each other across campus on any number of things with wheels. “Here, we recorded these with one of my inventions. It’s like a camera, but you can stick it pretty much anywhere. We called it the GoPro.”

“He told me so much about you,” says Honey Lemon. She hands over the purikura she took with Tadashi when they went to Disneyworld.

“It’s really all because of that time Tadashi applied to work at my dad’s sushi place,” Wasabi admits. “Not to be racist, but we all thought he’d be a natural.”

“I never quite felt the whole nickname thing with him, you know?” Fred pouts. “I really really wanted to give him one, though! I don’t know why I couldn’t think of one!”

“Tadashi is here,” says Baymax. He sounds like Tadashi but unmistakeably robotic. Hiro doesn’t know if he imagined it, that time in the portal. Baymax had sounded human then.

“Where?” Hiro asks, simply because he never has before. Baymax squints.

“Tadashi is here,” he says, pointing to his chest. It stays dark, but a voice fades in. Hiro presses his hand against Baymax instinctively, as if he can feel the voice as well as hear it.

“Make sure Hiro knows that,” he hears. “Tell him what I’d tell him in that situation. You know, like _I’m here_.”

Hiro’s eyes grow wide.

“Things like that,” Tadashi continues.“ _Are you alright? Hang on, don’t worry. Hiro. I will always be with you_.”

The voice fades. Baymax looks at Hiro and pats him on the head.

“There there,” he says in that tinny voice, so different from Tadashi’s. “Will hearing more improve your mental health?”

Hiro tackles Baymax and flops down on top of him.

“What do you think?”

**Author's Note:**

> I just wanted to have Tadashi being such a pro he predicts all the trouble Hiro could get into and makes Baymax as a sort of countermeasure to all of it.
> 
> Sort of based around how it would really make more sense to have an integrated chip for stuff like language and movement and then allow full customisation with the data card slots. Also how Baymax can still do stuff that's not directly related to him deactivating after Hiro says the whole 'I am satisfied with my care' thing at the end. And how Baymax's voice gets more and more human-sounding and it's not really Tadashi's voice BUT IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN I WOULD HAVE LIKED THAT.


End file.
